In this age of “Social Media”, where it seems everyone and anyone is a participant, we have the wonderful opportunity to expand our horizons and “meet” new people. Sometimes those people are a direct reflection of ourselves and sometimes not so much, but generally the social mixing is benign to positive.
Over my four and a half years participating in the Cyber Flu Community I have gotten to know a goodly number of folk scattered around the world. Some I have even met in the “meat world”. Generally, it’s been an overall and solid “plus” for me, but I have interacted with a few that proved to me [yet again] that I tend to be too naive and trusting. But, even with the bad experiences I still believe it’s better to be naive and trusting [to a point] rather than cynical. I just chalk the “bad” experiences up to my personal learning and growth.
Given my own experiences, both good and bad, I kinda just chuckled softly to myself when I came across this today:
Is Trust a big deal for you on Twitter [excerpt]
Here in Hawaii over the past couple of days a social media war been ongoing. According to a local blog post local Twitter celebrity, Arleen Anderson @alohaarleen with 80,000 followers has had some serious accusations made against her. A war is being waged against her from a lot of well known locals on multiple fronts, and she is fighting back instead of responding to the accusations.
Looking at this from a social media perspective the so called social media expert is not following the social media playbook. She should be setting the record straight because silence just fuels the fire. There have been multiple demands for her to explain the accusations, yet she has not done so which raises more suspicion in my mind.
I “judiciously” follow those I follow on Twitter. They have to meet at least a minimal measure of relevance to my interests and curiosities. And, even the few, as measured by “Twitter standards” I do follow [currently 223], the data flow, which I euphemistically referred to as the “Banality Stream” is too much to keep up with. But, it keeps me abreast of the geekie side of my local community and the knowledgeable of the cyber community I inhabit. I also use the Trending Topics quite a bit as a barometer of what is and what isn’t happening around the world.
I’m probably way too jaded, with too much experience behind me, but I don’t view the internet as a means of being one of the “Cool Kids”, rather, it is a glorious tool to mainline my addiction to information and data, but I am also far too frequently reminded that just because it’s on the internet doesn’t make it TRUE. So, it is our task to make personal judgements. Unfortunately, those personal judgements are not always correct.
That very simple and basic precept has fed two separate but related explorations: What we believe and why [memes, biases, etc] and social psychology. The following article from 2007 came to my attention because of its mention of popular beliefs ascribed to the the influenza vaccine but it also is illustrative of memes, biases and the social psychology encountered every day on the internet.
The Washington Post [2007]
Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach [excerpts]
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either “true” or “false.” Among those identified as false were statements such as “The side effects are worse than the flu” and “Only older people need flu vaccine.”
When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.
Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.
The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.
[snip]
Research on the difficulty of debunking myths has not been specifically tested on beliefs about Sept. 11 conspiracies or the Iraq war. But because the experiments illuminate basic properties of the human mind, psychologists such as Schwarz say the same phenomenon is probably implicated in the spread and persistence of a variety of political and social myths.
The research does not absolve those who are responsible for promoting myths in the first place. What the psychological studies highlight, however, is the potential paradox in trying to fight bad information with good information.
Schwarz’s study was published this year in the journal Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, but the roots of the research go back decades. As early as 1945, psychologists Floyd Allport and Milton Lepkin found that the more often people heard false wartime rumors, the more likely they were to believe them.
The research is painting a broad new understanding of how the mind works. Contrary to the conventional notion that people absorb information in a deliberate manner, the studies show that the brain uses subconscious “rules of thumb” that can bias it into thinking that false information is true. Clever manipulators can take advantage of this tendency.
The experiments also highlight the difference between asking people whether they still believe a falsehood immediately after giving them the correct information, and asking them a few days later. Long-term memories matter most in public health campaigns or political ones, and they are the most susceptible to the bias of thinking that well-recalled false information is true.
The experiments do not show that denials are completely useless; if that were true, everyone would believe the myths. But the mind’s bias does affect many people, especially those who want to believe the myth for their own reasons, or those who are only peripherally interested and are less likely to invest the time and effort needed to firmly grasp the facts.
The research also highlights the disturbing reality that once an idea has been implanted in people’s minds, it can be difficult to dislodge. Denials inherently require repeating the bad information, which may be one reason they can paradoxically reinforce it.
Indeed, repetition seems to be a key culprit. Things that are repeated often become more accessible in memory, and one of the brain’s subconscious rules of thumb is that easily recalled things are true.
Many easily remembered things, in fact, such as one’s birthday or a pet’s name, are indeed true. But someone trying to manipulate public opinion can take advantage of this aspect of brain functioning. In politics and elsewhere, this means that whoever makes the first assertion about something has a large advantage over everyone who denies it later.
The following are papers mentioned in the above Washington Post article:
At the end of the day I know that [perhaps] I am too naive and trusting, but at least I KNOW it. I also know that what I perceive to be true may very well not be given my own adopted memes, biases, and [sometimes] faulty logic filters. The trouble starts when people don’t know they are imperfect and they are exposing themselves to the “Banality Stream” of other imperfect people.
As Ayn Rand said before the internet even existed:
“You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions – or a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often that not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew.” (‘Philosophy: Who Needs It’)
I wonder what she would say to us today in the age of the internet and Twitter. I wonder what she would say to our recent understanding of exactly how difficult it is to “drop like a hot potato” even demonstrated falsehoods. I have little doubt that it would neither be meekly pronounced nor flattering. But then, Ayn Rand was never overly concerned with popularity either.
Posted via web from SophiaZoe
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